We describe a study of syntactic intervention administered to a 12;2 year old individual with syntactic SLI, who had difficulties in the comprehension and production of structures containing syntactic movement such as relative clauses, object questions, focalization sentences and sentences with verb movement. The intervention, comprised of 16 sessions, was based on syntactic theory and included explicit teaching of syntactic movement, relying on a type of syntactic knowledge that was intact – the argument structure of the verb. The participant’s performance was assessed before and after treatment, and for some of the tests also during the treatment and 10 month following its completion. The performance was assessed using various tasks that targeted comprehension, repetition and elicitation of semantically reversible sentences. Following treatment, the participant’s performance on all structures with syntactic movement showed substantial improvement compared to baseline, in many of the tasks reaching the performance of the age-matched control group. Treatment of phrasal movement resulted not only in improvement in treated structures, but also in generalization to untrained structures: although phrasal movement was only treated directly for relative clauses and focalization structures, the comprehension of object Wh questions, which also include phrasal movement, improved as well. The high performance level was maintained 10 months after the treatment.

This study explored the way Russian speakers with agrammatism understand and repeat movement-derived sentences, and examined whether they use morpho-syntactic cues to assist comprehension. The comprehension of three Russian-speaking individuals with agrammatism was tested, and their performance was compared to 15 matched control participants. In addition, the repetition ability of one of the participants was assessed. The study included topicalization structures, relative clauses, and SVO sentences. The individuals with agrammatism performed at chance level on topicalization structures and object relative clauses, whereas their comprehension of SVO sentences and subject relatives was significantly better and above chance. Their comprehension of topicalization structures was poor although all sentences included morphological cues of case marking on the topicalized object and on the subject. Case and gender morphology on the relative pronoun did not lead to better comprehension of object relative clauses compared to relative clauses in which gender inflection could not be used as a cue for interpretation. The repetition task indicated a considerable difficulty in repetition of sentences that include syntactic movement to high nodes of the syntactic tree.

Young children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A’-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of a proper extension of Relativized Minimality, the principle of syntactic theory which expresses locality effects linked to intervention, and whose psycholinguistic relevance has been highlighted in Grillo’s work on agrammatism. Six experiments have been conducted with 22 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;7-5;0 to substantiate our claims empirically. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of headed subject and object relatives with and without a resumptive pronoun, in sentences with lexically restricted (D-NP) subjects. Subject relatives were comprehended well, but the performance on object relatives was at chance. The addition of resumptive pronouns did not improve comprehension. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the lexical restriction of the moved element and the intervening subject, using free relatives and impersonal pro subjects

This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated that the children with S-SLI had a severe deficit in the comprehension of which object questions. Most of them performed randomly on these questions, and each of them performed significantly poorer than the controls. They understood subject questions better than object questions, and who questions better than which questions. These results join a growing body of evidence suggesting a deficit in sentences derived by Wh movement in syntactic SLI. We suggest that this deficit relates to the assignment of a thematic role to an element which moved across another argument of the same type. The second part of the study explored subtypes of SLI. We compared the comprehension of Wh questions in three groups of children with SLI: syntactic SLI (S-SLI or SySLI), lexical SLI (LeSLI), and pragmatic SLI (PraSLI). The results showed that whereas children with S-SLI have a significant deficit in the comprehension of which object questions, children with LeSLI and PraSLI understand Wh questions without difficulty.

Unaccusative verbs like fall are special in that their sole argument is syntactically generated at the object position of the verb, rather than at the subject position. Unaccusative verbs are derived by a lexical operation that reduces the agent from transitive verbs. Their insertion into a sentence often involves a syntactic movement from the object to the subject position. In order to explore the neurological reality of the distinction between different verb types and identify the cortical activations associated with the lexical and syntactic operations, we compared unaccusative verbs with verbs that do not undergo such operations – unergatives (verbs with one argument, an agent) and transitives (verbs with two arguments). The observed pattern of activation revealed that the brain distinguishes between unaccusative and unergative verbs, lending neurological support for the linguistic distinction. A conjunction analysis between the comparisons between unaccusatives and the other verb types revealed activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG). These, together with previous neuroimaging results, suggest that the IFG may be involved with the execution of the syntactic operation, whereas the MTG may be responsible for the lexical operation that derives unaccusative verbs.

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This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated that the children with S-SLI had a severe deficit in the comprehension of which object questions. Most of them performed randomly on these questions, and each of them performed significantly poorer than the controls. They understood subject questions better than object questions, and who questions better than which questions. These results join a growing body of evidence suggesting a deficit in sentences derived by Wh movement in syntactic SLI. We suggest that this deficit relates to the assignment of a thematic role to an element which moved across another argument of the same type. The second part of the study explored subtypes of SLI. We compared the comprehension of Wh questions in three groups of children with SLI: syntactic SLI (S-SLI or SySLI), lexical SLI (LeSLI), and pragmatic SLI (PraSLI). The results showed that whereas children with S-SLI have a significant deficit in the comprehension of which object questions, children with LeSLI and PraSLI understand Wh questions without difficulty. Keywords: SLI, Wh question, comprehension, Hebrew, S-SLI, SLI subtypes 1.

Reuth medical center We report a new type of dysgraphia, which we term dyscravia. The main error type in dyscravia is substitution of the target letter with a letter that differs only with respect to the voicing feature, such as writing “coat ” for “goat”, and “vagd ” for “fact”. Two Hebrewspeaking individuals with acquired dyscravia are reported, TG, a man aged 31, and BG, a woman aged 66. Both had surface dysgraphia in addition to their dyscravia. To describe dyscravia in detail, and to explore the rate and types of errors made in spelling, we administered tests of writing to dictation, written naming, and oral spelling. In writing to dictation, TG made voicing errors on 38 % of the words, and BG made 17 % voicing errors. Voicing errors also occurred in nonword writing (43 % for TG, 56 % for BG). The writing performance and the variables that influenced the participants ’ spelling, as well as the results of the auditory discrimination and repetition tasks indicated that their dyscravia did not result from a deficit in auditory processing, the graphemic buffer, the phonological output lexicon, the phonological output buffer, or the allographic stage. The locus of the deficit is the phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, in a function specialized in the conversion

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